Inconsistent Behavior of Lists

[Brian Yennie]

Dan,

It appears to me that you're hitting the difference between strings and 
lists. The native data type in Rev is a string, and if you want it to 
be treated specially because it follows some sort of list syntax, 
you'll need to script that behavior. Otherwise you would have the 
opposite effect- many people would be alarmed if spaces started 
disappearing from their strings any time they followed a certain 
pattern. Unfortunately list is not a native type, whereas associative 
arrays and strings are.

Generally, this is where split and combine come in handy, plus possibly 
some replace and regex to clean things up. Is there a particular task 
you have in mind?

If your primary concern is extra whitespace, could you write a simple 
trim() function which removes it, and run your item chunking through 
that?

I agree with (some) others that it's not a bug, but I could see an 
enhancement- maybe something like an "ignoreWhitespace" global property 
that could be set, much like the "caseSensitive" property.

- Brian

> A list should be seen as a comma-delimited data container where commas 
> separate data elements. Spaces after commas should not be significant. 
> They aren't in any other language I know of that processes list data 
> structures. a="1",b="2" and a="1", b="2" should be identical. In Rev, 
> they are not. Rev sees the first element of the second item  as " b", 
> which makes no syntactic sense as far as I can tell.
>
> Anyway, it appears nobody else thinks this is a bug so i won't BZ it. 
> I'll just grouse.
>
> Dan